The Aiud Wedge – Again

In the great Whac-a-Mole game of pseudoarchaeology, the same old claims just keep on popping their little heads up, no matter how many times the debunkers whack them. Today’s Mole popped up on my yahoo news feed as a startling revelation—from the Mirror—and was rapidly covered by Fox News, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, the Sun, and other sterling source of information: the mysterious Object (or Wedge) of Aiud.

According to the headlines, experts believe this mysterious aluminium object dating back 250,000 years could be part of an ancient UFO. Which experts? What aluminum object? The story goes that workmen near the town of Aiud, Romania, uncovered a clump of three mysterious objects thirty feet below the surface on the banks of the River Mure. Two of the objects were identified as fossilized mastodon bones, dated 10K-80K BC. The third was the big surprise: tentatively identified at first as an axehead, it was then found to be made of an aluminum alloy, and dated as early as a quarter million years ago.

Now, since humans did not begin to process aluminum until the 19th century, the object was clearly not made by humans—ergo, it was made by aliens. Furthermore, the particular alloy of aluminum was not one that could possibly have been produced on Earth. The shape of the piece was interpreted as part of the landing gear of a Vertical Take Off (VTO) vehicle, no doubt of unearthly design. Its association with the fossils suggested that, long ago, an alien vessel collided with a mastodon (or in some tellings, a hairy rhino), and this bit dropped off. But because the discovery was made in 1973 (or 1974) behind the Iron Curtain, it fell under a pall of secrecy until the story was broken in the 1990s by Romanian UFOlogists.

The Object of Aiud has had a small but steady presence on UFO websites and OOPart lists ever since, but it is not clear to me why it suddenly became world news today. And it is bloody typical that the “mystery” was revived even though the whole farrago bristles with red flags, and has already been decisively debunked. Indeed, the major debunking, in a 2015 series of nine articles by a blogger nymmed Hil Blairious, is a thing of beauty, worth reading as a textbook case of how to approach such a story.

Here are the highlights. The mystery object is almost certainly an excavator bucket tooth, rather crudely fabricated of perfectly ordinary Series 2000 aluminum alloy, possibly even in the Metalurgica Aiud foundry right there on the banks of the Mure. And it was found in an excavation on a construction site, which was no doubt being excavated using heavy machinery. It seems to me there are at least two rival scenarios here.

ONE: A clamshell excavator digging a big hole into Pleistocene sediments uncovers a couple of strange objects that look like large bones, which are packed up with some of the surrounding matrix and sent off for official examination. Included in the matrix is a worn and discarded bucket tooth, which the examiners assume is one of the objects sent for assessment. A mystery is born.

TWO: A quarter million years ago, an alien spacecraft buzzing what will someday became Transylvania has a close encounter with a hairy rhino, and leaves behind a bit of its landing gear and a dead hairy rhino.

25 comments

Yep, that was one of the red flags. A lot seemed to hinge on the depth of oxidation on the surface of the aluminum, and a lot on the depth at which it was discovered, neither of which mean anything. What the Swiss lab did was not made clear.

Actually, certain aluminum alloys (including the 2000 series) are sufficiently hard, and can be used for bucket teeth – especially, though not exclusively, where striking sparks would be dangerous, as in coal mines or around gas. Not used so much nowadays, perhaps, but more so in the 1970s. Check out the uses of duralumin, the old name for Al-Cu alloys.

just to clarify…most “digging teeth” on dirt working equipment and the like are actually “covers” for the original teeth on the bucket/blade poured/ cast at the foundry. This does not have the “cavity” to cover the actual bucket teeth.

If modern, it would fit nicely into the “window clamp/ bracket” device range. Perhaps the existing hole is threaded but unnoticed due to “patina” on it. I’ve also seen similar “wedges” used to secure equipment on heavy haul trailers.

That object has a pretty decent amount of patina. I would be more curious about that than anything else. I feel being able to determine that more than anything else would yield the best answer. My background is in science. Guessing what the object is, where it came from, and does it group in with the other objects is secondary to whether or not the object was intentionally aged or naturally aged. If naturally aged how long something of that composition would take to get to its current state in that region of the world, how many layers down it was found, and can it be verified that this object was found at that depth? How this lab verified this is of utmost importance, and should be the focal point of this discussion, not if this is a piece of a digging tool. Was the object taken to another lab to verify testing? If all these tests were duplicated multiple times at multiple labs with the same results they cannot be dismissed because they don’t fit some narrative. That is not how science goes. For example we have found that the earth has a magnetic field around it that protects earth from so-called cosmic rays. This doesn’t mean God did it or aliens, simply that it exists.

Yanno if you google this…. ridiculous absurdity (I know that’s redundant; completely warranted! lol) ya gotta get to the SECOND page before you reach the FIRST article (yours; t/y!) which offers any kinda reasonable alternative to this being a 250,000 year old broken off chunk of Ziggy Stardust’s busted up, raggedy-ass SPACESHIP?? Driven to earth by what can now only reasonably be attributed, quite rather obviously, to MAMMOTH HUNTING space aliens??! 👽 (and now we know why they went extinct!) 🤪

And don’t forget, the Earth is flat, the planets rotate around the Earth, etc etc, need i go on.. if it weren’t for people who thought ‘outside the box’, we will still be hunting our dinner with Spears.. the skeptic movement of today has taken up where the Catholic Church, not just the Inquisition, but the Catholic Church as a whole left off.. say anything that goes against what’s believed to be fact, you will get be crucified, burned at the stake, beheaded or nowadays, laughed at , belittled ,scoffed, ridiculed, reputations ruined for your ideas.. Galileo,Copernicus , Rodger Bacon, Bruno and I could go on and on are examples what the church did to free thinkers and I’m sure if the Skeptics off today could get away with the same thing, they would.. there are unexplainable things out there, unexplainable events do occur, think for yourself people don’t let a close minded group of people steer you in the wrong direction.. skepticism is a healthy thing if it’s done evenly across the board but closing your eyes and denying something that could possibly be true is not healthy at all in fact is quite dangerous..

Well, that’s quite a rant. Naughty skeptics, eh? You keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means. In fact, I think it’s quite a long time since I’ve seen such an entertainingly muddle-headed and ignorant screed. Just out of masochistic interest, what do you think the evidence supports in this case?

Can I pop in & just say I have a thing for anomalies & this looks like an anomaly, assuming of course that the “facts” of it’s discovery are genuine.
Here’s another. Broken Hill Man was dug up in 1921 in what is now Zambia, & there can be little doubt as to the age of a Homo Heidelbergensis, can there? These guys have not been around for many, many tens &/or hundreds of thousands of years.
BHM has a bullet wound in his head. He has a small hole on the left-hand side of his skull & a much large exit wound on the right. Up until decades of study sientific study of modern bullet wounds to the skull proved this wound was an ancient bullet wound, it had thoroughly puzzled science.
The fact that science has now proven that Broken Hill Man was shot by a high-velocity round many tens of thousands of years before we officially discovered gun-powder is about as interesting as the Patina on this artifact.
A bullet wound in an ancient hominid & Patina dating this aluminium artefact from a similar time period is interesting, in the least, in my opinion.
It is not proof of aliens or time travel. It’s proof we don;t know everything we think we know.

I’m unfamiliar with the case, but how do you know that the shooting injury didn’t occur much later? I’m an engineer. I find it very hard to believe that science would be stumped by this relatively simple issue.

Can I pop in & just say I have a thing for anomalies & this looks like an anomaly, assuming of course that the “facts” of it’s discovery are genuine.
Here’s another. Broken Hill Man was dug up in 1921 in what is now Zambia, & there can be little doubt as to the age of a Homo Heidelbergensis, can there? These guys have not been around for many, many tens &/or hundreds of thousands of years.
BHM has a bullet wound in his head. He has a small hole on the left-hand side of his skull & a much larger exit wound on the right. Up until decades of sientific study of modern bullet wounds to the skull proved this wound was an ancient bullet wound, it had thoroughly puzzled science.
The fact that science has now proven that Broken Hill Man was shot by a high-velocity round many tens of thousands of years before we officially discovered gun-powder is about as interesting as the Patina on this artifact.
A bullet wound in an ancient hominid & Patina dating this aluminium artefact from a similar time period is interesting, in the least, in my opinion.
It is not proof of aliens or time travel. It’s proof we don;t know everything we think we know.

You know, in introductory Archaeology classes, we had a joke about Broken Hill Man. We called him “Cowboy” because of the apparent gunshot wound, straight out of the OK Corral. And then, when we’d all had a little laugh with the students, we’d explain about the poor sod’s truly horrific dental problems,and the fact that abscesses and infections can and do eat right through bone, and can leave little round lesions that look like BHM’s “bullet hole.” No, science has not “proven” that BHM was shot with a high-velocity round. Detailed physical and taphonomic analysis show that he suffered horribly from his teeth.

Exactly! No one said it was “Aliens”, “Time Travelers” etc. All we NEED to be saying is, “How did it get that amount of patina on it?” “Is it real or artificial?” and “can the story be verified?” Anything else said on this blog is “unscientific” and is propelling a “story”, by placing the cart before the horse. 😉 Sorry, but we’re not all that stupid, most of us on here have read, “1984” in high school already. 😉 🙂

I have thoroughly enjoyed reading the blog while chuckling at Ancient Aliens today. It is an interesting case study in listening to folks without the appropriate background theorize on what something is. I think it is a bit depressing that these folks cannot express any sort of appreciation for our accomplishments without assuming that aliens did it all for us. SMH. Thank you for your blog. It is very interesting. 🙂

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About Rebecca

A natural-born atheist with a fundamentalist Christian background, I have spent sixty years so far trying to decide what to be when I grow up. Meantime, I’ve kept myself busy earning a PhD in Archaeology from Cambridge, and working variously as an archaeologist in Egypt and the Sudan, a housewife and mother in Northern Ireland, a technical editor in Kuwait, a desktop publisher and part-time life model in Hong Kong, and a university sessional lecturer in Calgary and Berlin.
At intervals through all this, I have published four novels and numerous short stories - mostly fantasy and horror, but also including a collection of Biblical riffs, from which this blog takes its name. Recently, I returned to my roots in Western Canada, combining writing with raising chickens and vegetables on an acreage in the Kootenays, supervised by many cats.